Designing Dynamic Templates

When you design a dynamic template, you want to have high confidence that the resulting variations will each be on-brand and free of visual defects.

 

Indivio provides a process and visual QA tool that enables you to gain this confidence by previewing exactly how your template will perform with variations of data.

 

Sample Resources

Example Template project for After Effects 2018 or later (zip)

Example Gsheet to test / validate template

 

 

Designing Dynamic Templates

1. Plan - Prepare the Validation Feed

2. Design your Template

3. Onboard Template

4. QA your template design with Validation Feed

5. Publish your Template
 

 

1. Plan - Prepare the Validation Feed

 

Planning your dynamic design starts with setting up the Validation Feed that will be used to drive variations for testing your dynamic template.  

See more about preparing validation feeds here.

 

The following are considerations when planning your template design and validation feed:

• Designing for Relevance:
  • Ask yourself how you plan to make your template design relevant - what data and assets are you able to leverage for making creative meaningfully different for each audience?  
  • In the context of products, these might be different USPs, product photos, sales pricing, testimonials, starred reviews.  Perhaps you want to tailor your to your audience's location, segmentation, product interests - the possibilities are truly endless here
  • Ask yourself what variables do you want to test in the creative?  This could be messaging, imagery, colors, template layouts  
    
• Feed Columns:
  • Make sure there is a column in the feed for each dynamic element - such as texts, colors, or links to media such as images, video, or audio clips.  Extra columns that may exist in the feed are ignored.
  • Make your dynamic layer names in the template consistent with the feed column name in order to streamline workflows and avoid errors.
    
    
• Row Variability: In order to make sure your template will work with your full data feed, you want to have a variety of sample rows that are representative of the variations that can be expected in the full data set.
  • Pay special attention to the variability of text and media inputs.  
    • For text, plan to design for both the min and max text length you want to display.  
    • For images and video, make sure your design can handle a variety of sizes.  
      
      
• Conditional Elements: Identify if any visual elements should be on for one audience and not for another - e.g. showing a sales tag on a sale item but not on a regular item. Consider also designing for elements that should appear in the future - e.g. activating a holiday theme or message on a specific date.
  • Conditional elements will be triggered based on the presence of specific data in the feed.  
  • Add a column to the validation feed for each conditional element you plan to have in the template.
  • Add a row for each value of the conditional element you want to test.

 

When you are done with this step, you should have a Validation Feed with columns for all the image, text, color, video, audio, and conditional fields you plan to vary in the template design.  You will use this file to QA your template design. 

 

 

2. Design your Template

The challenges with designing for dynamic creative stem from how variations of texts, images, and videos are handled.  Design problems can results from:

1. Variable lengths and sizes
2. Alignment of elements
3. Turning elements on and off

 

 

Refer to the “validation feed” with the sample rows of data that you created during Planning to confirm whether your design will handle the different variations.

 

 

 

1- Enabling Dynamic Text, Image, and Video Layers

• Enable text element for dynamic

1) Create a new text layer and set layer name to match feed column name

2) Set layer label / color to green

3) Convert the text to "paragraph text" by right-clicking on the text

4) Set the paragraph text area to be big enough to handle the longest text value

 

• Enable image / video element for dynamic

1) Add asset to project footages, set asset name to match feed column name, and change the label to green in footages.

2) Create a new layer with the footage by dragging it directly, so it uses the same name and so the layer is also labeled green

3) Right click on the new layer and pre-compose the layer to add effects and transformations

  

• Additional Tips - Designing for Variable Lengths / Sizes
  • Automatically scaling text
  • Automatically scaling assets
  • Changing the size of dependent design elements
  • Changing the position [x,y] of design elements dynamically

 

• See Working with Conditional Elements (coming soon)

 

2- Adding Preview Markers

1. Add a new layer (can be null) and change the layer label color to orange
2. Move the Current Time Indicator to the desired time
3. Add a marker by using the menu Layer > Add Marker.  A new marker will appear on the layer.
4. Double-click the marker and change the comment to a number that reflects the order of the thumbnail e.g. 0, 1, 2, 3… etc.
5. Repeat for each desired thumbnail
6. Ensure that all green dynamic layers have at least one marker covering it on the timeline

 

Use the Template Design Checklist to make sure your design is ready for the next step: onboard.

 

Each After Effects template project should have dynamic layers (green) and preview markers (orange):

 

 

3. Onboard Template

1. Review the Template Design Checklist
2. Prepare Template Project for Onboarding - this involves collecting project dependencies, saving the right version of the project, and compressing the files into a zip archive.
3. Create Template

 

Next, if you haven’t done so already, take the “validation feed” with sample data and create a feed on Indivio to be used with the template for QA.

• Create Feed - CSV

 

Once you have a template onboarded successfully and a feed created, you are ready to QA the template design.

 

 

   

 

4. QA Template Design with Validation Feed

 

The QA step involves rendering variations of static and video media using the onboarded template and the validation feed.  Indivio will render variations for real-time preview, so you can quickly see many different versions and identify any issues with the design.  Use Thumbnail view to scale up the thumbnails and make it easier to review.

• Create Media (Images and Videos) From Feed
• Change the size of thumbnail previews

 
Sample QA screen:

 

If issues are identified with the template design, adjustments can be made to the design and the template can be updated for further testing.  Follow the "Update Template" workflow to updating an existing template instead of creating a new template.  Redo step 4 until you are satisfied with how your template design is handling variations.

• Update Template

 

 

5. Publish your Template

 

Once the QA process is complete and your template is approved, you need to Publish your template so it can be used to render publish-quality assets and used in Campaign creation workflows.  To do this, open the Template Details modal and hit the "Publish" button.  The Template is now ready for use in Publish-quality workflows.